Content Strategy articles

Ah, kids…The light of our lives. They bring joy, fulfillment, laughter, and love. Then they start crying, and I hand them right back to their parents. Don’t get me wrong. I like children in the abstract. I believe they are the future, and so they should be protected and nurtured…elsewhere. I’ve even been given responsibility over large numbers of them for hours at a time, back in my old missionary days. It still happens sometimes, because...

As a UX writer, it’s my job to know how to create web copy that convinces readers to take action. That said, it doesn’t matter how engaging of a story I craft for my clients’ web pages or blog posts. If what I’ve written looks terrible on the page, no one will bother to read it. Here’s the problem though: UX writers are not designers. No matter how many short sentences we write to succinctly communicate a point or jargon-free copy we craft...

When we look at the very best content, it’s almost always about telling a story: From memorable TV adverts that run like a romantic mini series to sophisticated modern content campaigns that draw on the user community for experiences, the straight narrative provides the kind of emotional connection that builds a great brand. Websites in particular can benefit by placing storytelling and narrative techniques at their heart: this allows...

Running low on content ideas? User-generated content (UGC) is becoming a more and more popular means of filling company websites. When used correctly, it can actually end up adding a near endless, high-quality stream of relevant content for your business to use. Of course, figuring out the right way to incorporate user-generated content into your site or blog can be a real challenge. It has to be done in a way that engages your audience while...

Every day, thousands—if not millions—of people are all asking themselves the same, simple question: what do I post now? If you’ve been reading for a while, you know what I’m getting at. Regular content: It’s good for your website’s soul. Also its relevance. But what if I told you that you didn’t have to write anything for yourself at all? What if I told you that there are thousands—if not millions—of hard-working people getting...

In a recent post, I discussed how caution needs to be taken when designing websites for a global audience. Different cultures perceive things like color quite differently from one another. Devices that might be popular in one region of the world might not be used in another. And the customs each country has—even for something as seemingly insignificant as filling out a contact form—can vary greatly. Needless to say, global web design...

Before you ever sit down to design a website for a client, you develop user personas that are representative of their target audience. Once you’ve established an identity for the main user (or users), you can more easily shape an experience that caters to their needs and motivations. But what do you do when the target audience isn’t so clearly defined into one or two neatly packaged personas? Take a website like Zappos, for instance. Zappos...

They say that an image is worth a thousand words, and web designers certainly seem to have taken it to heart: the trend for image-rich, stylised page design means that there is now often little room for writing on a web page. Looking at recent trends in web design, we see full-screen photos, minimalist split-screens and enticing overlays. It’s all very visual, and not one of the examples contains many words on the featured pages. These trends...

Exposure. Engagement. Interaction. Trolls calling you horrible things in real time. You can have all of these buzzwords and more through the magic of live streaming over the Internet! It’s not all that bad, actually. In a world where video has become increasingly dominant online, more and more people are going one step further by consuming their video live. It’s kind of like television, only it’s easier to find stuff that’s relevant...

“Why isn’t my site ranking in searches? Why has traffic not improved since we hired you? Calls from customers are actually down... do you even know what you’re doing?!” Ah…the music of irate customers, whose site you have lovingly designed and crafted only to see it filled with insipid writing so bad and error strewn, that it is actually putting customers off the company. The Internet is still littered with examples of slick-looking...

There’s an old saying about dresses and speeches which rightly points out that both should be long enough to cover the subject. In the modern era, men in particular would be well advised to drop all reference to female attire and talk about blogs instead. How long should a blog be? The infinite Internet has done away with strict word counts and in theory, every online article can be as long as the author feels necessary to get their point across....

Recently I have encountered more and more people asking for one specific thing: words, and lots of them. No, truly, I mean a lot of them. They want long-form content: articles that go from 2,000 to 5,000 words, and sometimes longer. Then I ran across our glorious lea... ahem... Zeldman’s article on the subject of long-form content, and the challenges of designing for it. I am not one to shy away from a challenge, but I was curious to know why. The...